Create new Teams Planner and automatically incorporate data in PowerBI

[alex2811]

Hi everyone,

next year we are going to start using Microsoft Teams as our main tool for intra-company and intra-project communication and collaboration. We will especially make use of the Planner app as well as the new "Lists" app in order to track issues and tasks within a project. These are great features, however I see one major issue: Every planner app and every list creates a new, isolated entity in which it stores its data. I would rather like them to put all the data into one central data pool that I can then query with PowerBI in order to create a risk report for the entire project portfolio. 

2 questions in this regard:

a) is it possible to connect PowerBI to the Planner App data? I couldn't find any connectors but I thought there might be workarounds like using Power Automate or Graph API (I am not experienced in those but would start digging deeper into those topics if you guys tell me that this is the way to go)

b) Is it possible to automatically incorporate that data into a powerBI dataset once a new Planner app is created?

Background info: We will create one team per project. Each one of the project phases will have a seperate channel (like design and engineering / calculation and budget / site management / ...) - The thing is, at any given time we have 50+ active projects. Each channel will  have its own planner. So I will be looking at 200+ planner apps that need to be consolidated into one PowerBI dataset. There is no way to handle this manually. Any ideas? 

Again, workarounds are welcome, even if this involves intermediate steps like pushing data from the individual Planners to a central sharepoint list or SQL server table using Power Automate.

thanks for any advice.

Alex

[ImkeF · Accepted solution]

Hi @alex2811 ,
yes, that should work (at least in theory).
You have to create a custom connector for the Graph API ( see here for example Microsoft Graph API Custom Connector for Power BI (quickbites.dev) )
Then, this endpoint will deliver all your existing apps in a group: 
List plans - Microsoft Graph v1.0 | Microsoft Docs
If you give your plans a name that allows selecting the relevant apps by their name already, you don't have to grab all details for them in the second step and can speed up the process by just pulling details for the relevant ones.
This endpoint would retrieve all tasks for the plans: List tasks - Microsoft Graph v1.0 | Microsoft Docs
Getting tasks: Get plannerTask - Microsoft Graph v1.0 | Microsoft Docs
Get task details: Get plannerTaskDetails - Microsoft Graph v1.0 | Microsoft Docs

It would certainly be easier with flow, as you have standard connectors for it already.

But I don't now how long a refresh and update into a SQL-DB would take there, as it will involve a couple of "Apply to each"-steps.

[alex2811]

Hi Imke,

sorry, I am a bit late to reply. Thank you for this piece of info, now I am confident that this can be done and I have a starting point.

thanks again,

Alex